Here’s an innovative idea: Give students a say in teaching

Dolores County School District Superintendent Bruce Hankins and Trailblazer Elementary teacher Ann Yenne shape their project questions with moderator Alex Fiorillo during a design thinking workshop called SpaceLab, a project of the Colorado Education Initiative.

Jenny Brundin/Colorado Public Radio

The first thing you need to know about Daniel Sharpe is that he grew up in a really small town of a few hundred people; Lake City on Colorado’s Western Slope. There he’d go to school, and the teacher would ask, “What do you want to do? What do you want to learn about?”

“The kids would say, ‘dissect something!’” Sharpe recalls. So they’d dissect. The next day they wanted to learn about physics, so the teacher says, “OK, let’s learn about fulcrums.”

One morning he and his classmates asked if, for gym class, they could climb a Fourteener. The response? They said, “yeah, sure, no problem,” Sharpe laughs.

Here’s an innovative idea: Give students a say in teaching

Dolores County School District Superintendent Bruce Hankins and Trailblazer Elementary teacher Ann Yenne shape their project questions with moderator Alex Fiorillo during a design thinking workshop called SpaceLab, a project of the Colorado Education Initiative.